The fields are hoary with December's frost,
I too am hoary with the chills of age.
But through the fields and through the untrodden woods
Is rest and stillness--only in my heart
The pall of winter shrouds a throbbing life.
A week after that Treby riot, Harold Transome was at Transome Court. He
had returned from a hasty visit to town to keep his Christmas at this
delightful country home, not in the best Christmas spirits. He had lost
the election; but if that had been his only annoyance, he had good humor
and good sense enough to have borne it as well as most men, and to have
paid the eight or nine thousand, which had been the price of
ascertaining that he was not to sit in the next Parliament, without
useless grumbling. But the disappointments of life can never, any more
than its pleasures, be estimated singly; and the healthiest and most
agreeable of men is exposed to that coincidence of various vexations,
each heightening the effect of the other, which may produce in him
something corresponding to the spontaneous and externally unaccountable
moodiness of the morbid and disagreeable.
Harold might not have grieved much at a small riot in Treby, even if it
had caused some expenses to fall on the county; but the turn which the
riot had actually taken was a bitter morsel for rumination, on more
grounds than one. However the disturbances had arisen and been
aggravated--and probably no one knew the whole truth on these
points--the conspicuous, gravest incidents had all tended to throw the
blame on the Radical party, that is to say, on Transome and on
Transome's agents; and so far the candidateship and its results had done
Harold dishonor in the county: precisely the opposite effect to that
which was a dear object of his ambition. More than this, Harold's
conscience was active enough to be very unpleasantly affected by what
had befallen Felix Holt. His memory, always good, was particularly vivid
in its retention of Felix Holt's complaint to him about the treating of
the Sproxton men, and of the subsequent irritating scene in Jermyn's
office, when the personage with the inauspicious name of Johnson had
expounded to him the impossibility of revising an electioneering scheme
once begun, and of turning your vehicle back when it had already begun
to roll downhill. Remembering Felix Holt's words of indignant warning
about hiring men with drink in them to make a noise, Harold could not
resist the urgent impression that the offences for which Felix was
committed were fatalities, not brought about by any willing co-operation
of his with the noisy rioters, but arising probably from some rather
ill-judged efforts to counteract their violence. And this urgent
impression, which insisted on growing into a conviction, became in one
of its phases an uneasy sense that he held evidence which would at once
tend to exonerate Felix and to place himself and his agents in anything
but a desirable light. It was likely that some one else could give
equivalent evidence in favor of Felix--the little talkative Dissenting
preacher, for example: but, anyhow, the affair with the Sproxton men
would be ripped open and made the worst of by the opposite parties. The
man who has failed in the use of some indirectness, is helped very
little by the fact that his rivals are men to whom that indirectness is
a something human, very far from being alien. There remains this grand
distinction, that he has failed, and that the jet of light is thrown
entirely on his misdoings.
In this matter Harold felt himself a victim. Could he hinder the tricks
of his agents? In this particular case he had tried to hinder them, and
had tried in vain. He had not loved the two agents in question, to begin
with; and now at this later stage of events he was more innocent than
ever of bearing them anything but the most sincere ill-will. He was more
utterly exasperated with them than he would probably have been if his
one great passion had been for public virtue. Jermyn, with his John
Johnson, had added this ugly, dirty business of the Treby election to
all the long-accumulating list of offences, which Harold was resolved to
visit on him to the utmost. He had seen some handbills carrying the
insinuation that there was a discreditable indebtedness to Jermyn on
the part of the Transomes. If any such notions existed apart from
electioneering slander, there was all the more reason for letting the
world see Jermyn severely punished for abusing his power over the family
affairs, and tampering with the family property. And the world certainly
should see this with as little delay as possible. The cool, confident,
assuming fellow should be bled to the last drop in compensation, and all
connection with him be finally got rid of. Now that the election was
done with, Harold meant to devote himself to private affairs, till
everything lay in complete order under his supervision.
This morning he was seated as usual in his private room, which had now
been handsomely fitted up for him. It was but the third morning after
the first Christmas he had spent in his English home for fifteen years,
and the home looked like an eminently desirable one. The white frost was
now lying on the broad lawn, on the many-formed leaves of the evergreens
and on the giant trees at a distance. Logs of dry oak blazed on the
hearth; the carpet was like warm moss under his feet; he had breakfasted
just according to his taste, and he had the interesting occupations of a
large proprietor to fill the morning. All through the house now steps
were noiseless on carpets or on fine matting; there was warmth in hall
and corridors; there were servants enough to do everything, and to do it
at the right time. Skilful Dominic was always at hand to meet his
master's demands, and his bland presence diffused itself like a smile
over the household, infecting the gloomy English mind with the belief
that life was easy, and making his real predominance seem as soft and
light as a down quilt. Old Mr. Transome had gathered new courage and
strength since little Harry and Dominic had come, and since Harold had
insisted on his taking drives. Mrs. Transome herself was seen on a fresh
background with a gown of rich new stuff. And if, in spite of this, she
did not seem happy, Harold either did not observe it, or kindly ignored
it as the necessary frailty of elderly women whose lives have had too
much of dullness and privation. Our minds get tricks and attitudes as
our bodies do, thought Harold, and age stiffens them into
unalterableness. "Poor mother! I confess I should not like to be an
elderly woman myself. One requires a good deal of the purring cat for
that, or else of the loving grandame. I wish she would take more to
little Harry. I suppose she has her suspicions about the lad's mother,
and is as rigid in those matters as in her Toryism. However, I do what
I can; it would be difficult to say what there is wanting to her in the
way of indulgence and luxury to make up for the old niggardly life."
And certainly Transome Court was now such a home as many women would
covet. Yet even Harold's own satisfaction in the midst of its elegant
comfort needed at present to be sustained by the expectation of
gratified resentment. He was obviously less bright and enjoying than
usual, and his mother, who watched him closely without daring to ask
questions, had gathered hints and drawn inferences enough to make her
feel sure that there was some storm gathering between him and Jermyn.
She did not dare to ask questions, and yet she had not resisted the
temptation to say something bitter about Harold's failure to get
returned as a Radical, helping, with feminine self-defeat, to exclude
herself more completely from any consultation by him. In this way poor
women, whose power lies solely in their influence, make themselves like
music out of tune, and only move men to run away.
This morning Harold had ordered his letters to be brought to him at the
breakfast-table, which was not his usual practice. His mother could see
that there were London business letters about which he was eager, and
she had found out that the letter brought by a clerk the day before was
to make an appointment with Harold for Jermyn to come to Transome Court
at eleven this morning. She observed Harold swallow his coffee and push
away his plate with an early abstraction from the business of breakfast
which was not at all after his usual manner. She herself ate nothing:
her sips of tea seemed to excite her; her cheeks flushed, and her hands
were cold. She was still young and ardent in her terrors; the passions
of the past were living in her dread.
When Harold left the table she went into the long drawing-room, where
she might relieve her restlessness by walking up and down, and catch the
sound of Jermyn's entrance into Harold's room, which was close by. Here
she moved to and fro amongst the rose-colored satin of chairs and
curtains--the great story of this world reduced for her to the little
tale of her own existence--dull obscurity everywhere, except where the
keen light fell on the narrow track of her own lot, wide only for a
woman's anguish. At last she heard the expected ring and footstep, and
the opening and closing door. Unable to walk about any longer, she sank
into a large cushioned chair, helpless and prayerless. She was not
thinking of God's anger or mercy, but of her son's. She was thinking of
what might be brought, not by death, but by life.